[56b] Xenophon.—Swift’s note in the margin, marked, in future, S.
[56c] Spleen.—Horace.
[59] “But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.”
—Dryden’s “Virgil”
[60] “That the old may withdraw into safe ease.”
[61] In his subsequent apology for “The Tale of a Tub,” Swift wrote of these machines that, “In the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those who had the papers in their power blotted out, as having something in it of satire that I suppose they thought was too particular; and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning that was never thought on. And indeed the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistic, and therefore better exposing the pretended virtue of numbers, a superstition then intended to be ridiculed.”
[62a] “Under the rainy sky, in the meetings of three and of four ways.”
[62b] Lucretius, lib. 2.—S.
[62c] “’Tis certain, then, the voice that thus can wound;
Is all material body, every sound.”
[63] To be burnt or worm-eaten.